Deals sites like Slickdeals and Fatwallet

General
1

It would seem that many adlists block the click trackers used by sites like Slickdeals and Fatwallet. I don't know how pervasive these are and they could be problematic from a privacy standpoint. They don't serve ads AFAIK. To appease my wife, I've whitelisted most of the things listed in these two posts.

https://www.fatwallet.com/forums/fatwallet/312827
http://slickdeals.net/forums/faq.php?faq=sd_faq_item#faq_sdlink_faq_item

Seems most of it revolves around Commission Junction and CJ uses multiple sites as redirects. Is there an aspect that I should be concerned about by whitelisting these? Seems that it's only used to generate click based revenue for those sites.

2

I'm also interested in this. I wonder if it would be a good idea to create a new list specifically for referral links for sites like this so we could just whitelist an entire list. Ebates is pretty useful and also gets blocked.

3

Hi! I made a list, you can check out the repo, or here's the direct link to file

4

Thanks Anudeep! I didn't think anyone was really interested but this did catch quite a few views. I didn't keep track of the few that I had to add since I posted this originally. Seems that CJ's does some rotating (or Slickdeals is doing something else) so there were a few variations to the links that were listed in the 2 links I posted. I haven't noticed anything odd with having them whitelisted for this long.

7

I use a grease/tamper/violent monkey script to remove the tracking from slickdeals. It seems to work for most linksexcept for frontpage and sponsored posts. I use it with firefox desktop broswer; I don't know if it works with the mobile browser.

// ==UserScript==
// @name slickdeals notrack
// @namespace slickdeals
// @match https://slickdeals.net/f/*
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==

function doFilter() {
var links = document.querySelectorAll("a[data-product-products]");
links.forEach((link, i) => {
var url = new URL(link.href);
console.log("found " + url);
var host = url.hostname;
var encodedOrig = url.searchParams.get("u2");
if (host.endsWith("slickdeals.net") && encodedOrig) {
link.href = decodeURI(encodedOrig);
console.log("replacing with " + link.href);
}
})
}

doFilter();